


Sorrrrrt of But Not Really

by yourlibrarian



Series: Fanfic Genres [15]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, M/M, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 16:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30108447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: My own response to the whole "slash as anti-feminist" debate in progress. Since I don't write fic myself I'll have to approach this strictly from a reading standpoint, but I do have a few thoughts about it, mostly in terms of how the essay's lack of context seems to be so revealing.Originally posted March 25, 2008
Series: Fanfic Genres [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/465745
Kudos: 1
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Sorrrrrt of But Not Really

I'm surprised I have yet to see anyone [comment on the name of the blog](http://spinningspinsters.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/in-the-tradition-of-the-wickedary-part-two-by-dissenter/), because Spinster seemed pretty apropos considering how anti-sex the post seemed to be. And I have to say that my first impression of what guided her writing (purely from reading the fandom responses in the last day) was that it simply doesn't turn her crank. It's little wonder she needs to find such a complex response for something that most other people seem to find needs little explanation. In fact, I suspect slash gets the attention it does in large part because people who aren't entertained by it don't understand why anyone else is. 

This certainly explains my own reaction to any number of things from wrestling shows to NASCAR to barbeque ribs. (Now I kind of want to hear a feminist deconstruction of rib-eating.) And given her own point of view I can see how stories which focus on sex acts where women are entirely excluded, ones written by women at that, run so counter to her own beliefs that they would be deeply upsetting. However it seems to me somewhat disingenuous to not acknowledge the remove at which she is writing about something she can't grasp. There are certainly plenty of people in fandom who don't grasp it either. However if they stick around a while they usually recognize that fandom (read: humanity) is full of people who share some things in common with you and not others, and that there is no end of things which floats boats other than your own. I will not say that there aren't likely some deeply fascinating psychological puzzles at the root of this, nor that there isn't some reflection of our deeply flawed cultures at work there, but I do know that if you don't share something it makes it particularly difficult for you to explore it. You will always be missing something.

(Updated to add carlanime's contribution re: rib-eating. "Rib-eating reinforces the stranglehold of the patriarchy because it symbolically implies that women are somehow "lacking" and need completion--see myth of Eve being built from Adam's rib; see also Scarlett O'Hara being brought barbeque by a series of male suitors, while she sits helplessly, hobbled by impractical clothing and restrictive social mores. As well, because barbeque is the one form of cooking that popular culture typically associates with men, it subverts the reality of women's work, and seeks to deny that most food preparation falls to women.")

Many people have already pointed out the fact that her essay seems to spring from whole cloth since there's no context for anything she discusses. Just the fact that she leads off with this phrase "increasingly dominated by women" makes it pretty clear she has a very skimpy knowledge about fan history. What makes her think fanfic was ever dominated by men, as she later asserts? And since she believes this and notes that slash is dominated by women, doesn't she think that this turnover in itself would be an interesting statement? Some might even think that would suggest slash is written by women deliberately to keep boys out of a female sandbox. However that would only work if men perceived slash as being anti-male and anti-heterosexual rather than supportive of the patriarchy.

What I'm very curious about is how she came to be reading fanfic in the first place? And why focus on slash instead of het? If the frequent complaints of slash writers/readers are anything to go by, there is far more to engage feminist criticism in het than in slash, and it is _far_ more likely to be close to canon and engage in cultural clichés by its very nature. My guess is that it's exactly because slash is challenging to _something_ that it has gotten under her skin. Het fanfic certainly has many similar expressions in everything from romance novels to high literature to the canon they were taken from. Slash, not so much, which is one reason why fanfic remains an oasis of it and so many outsiders tend to focus on it. 

What’s odd is that she lists various current media fandoms, and yet makes statements about canonical fidelity that don't make a lot of sense. Has she never read an AU? What about RPS or original slash which have no canon to follow? While I think most fanfic springs from canon out of sheer necessity (people need to be able to recognize the characters and universe), what I've seen of fanfic, from gen to slash, is that it's there largely to present something not seen in canon. This can run from something as simple as exploring a character's motivation in a scene to branching off from a moment in canon and telling a completely different story. For that matter, how much canon is she familiar with that she could even make this statement? To really be able to analyze fanfic you have to understand the original sources pretty thoroughly, and not that many people have a grasp of that many different fandoms at once. Entirely aside from fanfic, I'm not sure she realizes how much meta writers don't necessarily agree with the canon.

Returning to slash, a lot of people are more interested in characters or their dynamics than sex . To me, the evidence that speaks most strongly to the truth of that is that many people are not, off the bat, slashers. Rather a lot of people find it as off-putting as she does (if, perhaps, for simpler reasons). However as they become accustomed to seeing it in fandom, many people do start reading slash and enjoying it. I don't think it's because the lot of them suddenly discovered they liked seeing men together so much as they realized they liked seeing particular characters together in new ways and perhaps also felt they were seeing some familiar stories through a new lens. Some people will read any kind of slash. Some only want to read about certain characters in certain ways. Every slasher is different, and one could be in fandom 20 years or more and still never run across certain groups who do things in very different ways. There are people out there still thinking they've invented the wheel when they write fic or make a vid. 

And speaking of inventing the wheel, the relevance of the Mary Sue style of story would seem to reveal many things that contradict her viewpoint. For that matter while few characters are blank slates, many of them are very open to different interpretations (one reason, I think, that there's often a distinct strain of stories that branch off from certain plot points, because they're moments where the character could have begun to define themselves differently). When you read the same character in 10 different stories it's often clear something different is being brought to each one.

Fandoms vary so widely. For example just the other day I saw a post discussing whether or not slash really was the majority genre in fanfic. People answering pointed out that it all depends on your fandom. For some it is, some have an enormous amount of gen, some see more het and it can also vary by fandom location. Someone once told me that Roswell fandom was fairly isolated on some posting boards and was almost entirely het fic. The slash writers ended up going to LJ where they'd get a better reception.

I find it pretty regrettable that this essay is posed as some sort of feminist revisionism of slash. I think that there _should_ be more feminist critique of fanfic texts given it's a largely feminine text produced by women with decades of culture behind it. It absolutely should be an object of study. But the essay just seems like dogma cloaked in superiority. 

Leaving that aside, she might want to parse her own statements more carefully. For example:

"To say they are drawing out a ‘gay subtext,’ and to attempt to attach revolutionary potential to this act is highly inaccurate, since homosocialism is one of the foundation stones of male supremacy, and fanfic authors who endorse and strengthen the homosocial relationships of male fictional characters by portraying them as homosexual are committing an act in support of patriarchy, not against it. "

On the one hand, I think she's completely correct in saying that homosocialism is ingrained in much of media and is itself one of the foundations of patriarchy. However homosocialism and homosexuality are rather different things, and as far as I can tell, the latter is quite the challenge to patriarchy or else why be so up in arms about it? It's actually (a type of) lesbian portrayal that is much more accepted by the general culture –- just look at television. I realize that TV in general has a poor portrayal of minorities of any stripe, or for that matter, almost any aspect of real life, but I think one could say that lesbians definitely outnumber gay men on television. (I think when it comes to news, men are actually portrayed more often than women, but I don't want to get sidetracked). 

Returning to the issue of "subtext," one of the things many men object to about slash is that something that is not necessarily erotic becomes textually so. Even those who do not argue against slash from a homophobic stance, point out rather reasonably that in many cases there seems to be no justification for it at all. Nothing could make this more obvious than the various incest lines of slash that have been vigorously debated in fandom in the last few years. For example, there is nothing subtextual about the homosocialism present in SPN. It is the clear focus of the show stated by everyone from critics to actors, showrunners and writers. Yet the family barrier was nothing of the kind to fanfic writers, who gladly mowed over this central fact in favor of telling the types of stories they wanted to see. There are also any number of stories written about characters who have never met in canon who are manipulated into sexual encounters. Slash may have sprung from subtext, but it has long become an end in itself quite separate from canon. There are also plenty of readers who have never seen or don't care for the canon at all but read simply for the fic. 

It surprises me though, that people seem to critique her statements about the strong strain of female hatred present in much fanfic (most obvious perhaps, but by no means exclusively in slash) or that a lot of curtainfic and mpreg exists where marriage is indeed a final outcome of the relationship, or that a lot of slash merely re-inscribes heterosexual clichés even on characters where such an outcome is not only completely unrealistic but even anachronistic. Certainly a quick look through metafandom's del.icio.us account will throw up any number of such critiques from within fandom itself, and across many fandoms. These occurrences can be seen in everything from texts that are officially dubbed feminist like Buffy, or those which have been critiqued as female-negative such as SPN. I would have to agree with her central tenet that a patriarchal culture leaves a lasting impression on everyone raised in it, and thus produces oddly twisted texts as a result. 

What her lack of fanfic history also fails to uncover though is the prevalent strain of h/c fic which, from what I've read, characterized a great deal of early slash and certainly continues to be a major genre of fanfic today. The violence, degradation, and physical injury which appears repeatedly seems to me to run quite counter to her idea of women "laying their offerings humbly at the feet of their hundreds of male cultural gurus." Although I believe that, as with all fanfic, motivations vary tremendously, I was always struck by the deep anger at and fear of men that such fanfic seemed to reveal. Since I am neither a psychology major, nor have I engaged in any serious study of fanfic texts myself, I can only report my own reactions. However it seemed to me that with all characters, but particularly the male ones, there is often a very conflicted dual expression coming through. It is easy to spot the anger and disdain for female characters because this is generally (but not always) unmasked. But texts which brutalize and traumatize women _exclusively_ seem to me to be very much in the minority. Texts that do so to men, however, are legion. And I've read at least a few commentaries by writers of h/c that the character that is most likely to be the sufferer is the one they love the most. 

Since h/c is not my particular kink, it remains something mysterious to me because I have little interest in seeing a character I care about suffer, especially in the deeply traumatic way that many do. I recognize that (especially in milder h/c stories) the temporary illness or injury of a favored character is as much a plot point to bring two characters together as alien spores, amnesia (which, while it could fall under h/c is generally utilized in an unrealistically nontraumatic way) or genderswap (and boy isn't that another whole kettle of fish she fails to engage with). However what I'm speaking about is not the more plot convenient strain of h/c but the much darker strain of stories that abound in numerous fandoms. It seems to me that, quite contrary to her opinion, these stories speak profoundly to the deep resentments of the many power imbalances between men and women in a society that is structured to favor male interests. One reader shared secondhand how another writer said "that the reason why she writes such extreme h/c stems from her own feelings of powerlessness in her life, which is due to her early relationships with men. I suspect there is a lot of this about and that the reason why people choose their best-loved character to inflict the pain on is because they, at some level, identify with them and find working through their recovery from the trauma with them to a better place beyond therapeutic." However other writers write extreme h/c for much the same reason that many write slash at all, which is that it is less frightening or uncomfortable to deal with difficult subjects or expectations when utilizing male bodies rather than female ones in stories where so many gender expectations come into play. 

So for a radical feminist, I am quite surprised that she fails to point out how women may feel so disempowered that they are unable to express this anger in more direct ways and instead build it into fiction. That so much fan fiction deals with supernatural worlds, which themselves often tell stories cloaked in metaphors, is another connection that seems to escape her.

She seems to think she's making a discovery in the discussion of homosocial behavior in fandom, though how anyone can miss it in such a female dominated landscape, I can't imagine. I'm pretty certain if you ask any male participant in fanfic circles he can point out examples, since he would be by definition left out of it. While I think others have challenged the idea that fanfiction circles are actually a "safe space" for expression, I have seen this idea expressed often enough that I think many believe its truth. A question she should have posed (had she actually been sufficiently immersed in fanfic communities to do so) would be "safe from whom"? It's certainly a question that's been addressed by some academics and researchers and you'd think it might put her on a bit of a different track, especially since in her previous entry she says:

"In the twentieth century, realising the gynocentric power of the ‘frivolous,’ ‘unimportant’ novel, Male Artists set about colonising the form and wresting it away from women. They corrupted the values and characteristics that, because of women, had come to be associated with the novel, like social realism, analyses of character and society, the importance of self-integrity and moral worth, and the possibility of personal and social transformation, and dragged it into the foreground where its revolutionary potential was deadened. The novel became the carrier of patriarchal values of dissociation, including nihilism, surrealism, alienation, hatred of oneself and others, and hatred, especially, of women, expressed through graphic depictions of sex."

Going back to the start of my essay, you'd think (again) that in the case of a form of writing that women have supposedly wrested away from men, that there would be something significant in that. However I found it interesting that she overlooks how fanfic may follow in the footsteps of the female novel, which was also characterized by a deep idealism. This is something I, at least, see expressed often in fanfic and which is also rooted in this space.


End file.
